Da Drought is Over (Hopefully)

No, the title of my post is not referring to Weezy being released from jail. It's about the hip-hop drought being over: the difficulty that rap has had in releasing multiple good or better hip-hop releases in a single year.

Hip-hop has really suffered the last few years. Sure there were still some bangin singles, like "Throw some D's", but it's been really difficult to get a lot of good full album releases in a year. In fact, any good hip-hop CDs I don't think would have been good enough to place too high on any year end lists, with the only exception really being Raekwon's last album. All the really great hip-hop stars haven't really been producing very high quality products. I remember when I'd just desperately crave for the next Madvillain album, although it's still clearly so far away, just because nothing would be coming out.

We haven't really had amazing years since the first half of the decade. Does anyone remember how absolutely amazing 2004 was?

• Madvillain - Madvillainy
• Kanye - College Dropout
• M.I.A. - Arular
• Dizzee Rascal - Showtime

Like, gawd damn those are some good debut releases from the first 3 artists! Ridiculous!

I'm hopeful that the times are changing now. This year has been a fairly good year so far with new albums from Big Boi (awesome album actually), Das Racist, and the resurgence of Kanye West. There's so much potential with the new Kanye album and the Kanye / Jay-Z one as well. It's not like there hasn't been a high amount of meh (Eminem, Lil Wayne), but I'm fairly hopeful that these new album will really overshadow the rest of them. That new Big Boi is so ridiculously hot and I'd dare say it's the best hip-hop album to come out in recent years.

Anyways, I'm hopeful that Kanye and his crew will help be at the forefront of this new reinvigoration of hip-hop. If that new album sucks, I'll be crushed.